The unkind verdict on Logan Sargeant’s year-and-a-half in Formula 1 was that he performed so poorly his team replaced him twice in less than a month.
First, at the end of July, when Williams announced Carlos Sainz Jnr would join then in 2025. Then again, after his disastrous showing in the Dutch Grand Prix, which prompted his immediate ejection in favour of rookie Franco Colapinto.
When Williams first announced Sargeant’s days were numbered, it was possible to look at the calibre of driver he was being replaced with and conclude that he always faced a challenge to hold onto that seat. Sainz is a three-times grand prix winner who brings almost a decade of F1 experience.
No doubt Sargeant didn’t measure up well against team mate Alexander Albon over their year-and-a-half alongside each other. But he would have needed a substantially higher level of performance to hold on to his seat against that standard of competition.
Despite the utterly one-sided nature of the contest between them, it was possible to find some cause for optimism about Sargeant’s potential. Yes, he hadn’t managed to out-qualify Albon once for a grand prix. But Sargeant had to do without Williams’ latest, lightest pieces for several races. Once the pair had parity, heading towards the summer break Sargeant had clearly narrowed the deficit on single-lap pace.
After announcing they had successfully wooed Sainz, Williams team principal James Vowles sought to soften the blow for Sargeant, talking up the progress he had made in his second season of F1. In particular, Vowles highlighted how Sargeant had reduced the number of mistakes he was making
“He builds up to the weekend in the way it needs to be,” said Vowles on Friday at Zandvoort. “And it’s not that he hasn’t progressed. If you look across the last 18 months, you can clearly see that from where he was to where he is now in terms of number of mistakes, proximity to Alex, where he’s qualifying and where he achieves, how many seconds behind he’s finishing now, it is all on the right journey.
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“What he’s very good at doing now, which was a weakness beforehand, was building up into the weekend, fundamentally. So finding the limit, but approaching it from a bottom up perspective rather than top down. Because top down, when you make one mistake, you lose a…
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